Hitchcock was awake. Starlight filtered through the forest canopy and dappled the walls of the cabin he shared with Lester. A trio of Clytemnestra’s beetle bots was resting in Lester's sleep-crumpled dreads, occasionally flicking their wings in response to dreams. Sometimes he forgot ...

Clytemnestra was in fragments. Her programs were spread across her stolen space ship, the station she just stole it from, and the small bots that she used to steal it. As each program relayed its experiences to the other, an avalanche of memory effects like ...

Lester was obsessed. It had been a year since the massive beam of light printed the white sphere that invited humanity to a distant star, and he still spent most of his time inspecting the sensor logs in his office. Pictures of the beam and ...

Elizabeth Stinton was frustrated. Her simulations for turbulence in her theoretical air sinter were a mess and if she didn't have something to show at the next board meeting she was pretty certain that they'd sell her startup for parts.

The pounding in my head is in sync with the ticking of the escalator steps as they rise from the netherworld of the convention center's floor. I pull a smile from memory and ignore the sweat in my eyebrows. So many happy attendees, clipping ...

Last weekend I had coffee at the wonderful Uptown Espresso with a friend from a nearby Amazon office. I write "a" nearby office because he's working on a multi-year project so secret that he can't even tell people which building he's in ...

I am a software engineering newbie. I thought that I knew a lot about it after I coded my first BASIC program on a TRS-100 way back in the before time, but now I see that the creation of software is a vast landscape of ...

I grew up in the future. My childhood room was next to an attic filled with science fiction so as soon as I could read I buried my nose in the universes of the great pulp era authors. I love it in that future because ...

One day soon a robot will replace me. I'll be focused on some gnarly coding problem, happily munching on green grapes and slouching like the meatbag I am, when the interaction designer, call her Alice, will walk by and ask me if I want ...

All of the production clusters I've retired have been ready to scale. As I pulled their plugs and listened to their disks spin down, as I slid them from their racks and thanked them for their service, each and every one of them was ...

There was a distinct moment when I realized that I had completely borked the accounting system for my photo mapping startup. It was February of 2004 and I was living and working out of a tiny apartment in Berkeley and had spent two days tracking ...

On the day I found out that my wife was cheating on me and had hired a divorce lawyer, I was defeated. I bailed out of the 3D web startup which I had been sweating over for years, leaving two of the nicest partners I ...

Like most web coders of a certain age, I use every new codebase as an opportunity to attempt the One True API System (OTAS) which honors the essence of the web, provides developers with exactly the syntax they need for expressing the representation and logic ...